Submit a Proposal

The Sponsored Programs and Research Compliance office is here to help you submit your proposal in a timely fashion. Our office has experienced tremendous growth over the last several years and continues to see a rise in the number of proposals sent to external funders.

For that reason, our office must prioritize proposals to ensure timely submission. Although every effort has always been and will continue to be made to ensure compliant proposal submission regardless of when you provide final packages to the staff, we ask that you provide at minimum a draft budget, budget justification and the sponsor's guidelines as soon as you have them in your possession. Notify SPARC of your upcoming submittal by contacting the proposal development team from the right-hand sidebar. We ask that you comply with the following suggested timeline for proposal submission.

Two weeksprior to the sponsor due date, please notify the proposal development manager of your intent to submit a proposal and provide details.

One weekprior to the sponsor due date, please have your proposal routing in RAMSeS, the university's proposal and award tracking database.

Three daysprior to the sponsor due date, please finalize your proposal and be available to correct errors reported back from the sponsor.

With these suggestions in mind, we also want you to be aware of the following:

Proposals sent to SPARC on the due date must be complete, ready for submission and approved in RAMSeS. SPARC cannot guarantee staff will be available for in-depth review of proposals or help with completion of proposals on submission due date.

SPARC will not submit your proposal prior to routing in RAMSeS, and depending on the number of people who need to see the proposal at various levels and their schedules, it can take as long as one week to receive all approvals. Please leave yourself ample time to route your proposal in RAMSeS. (Use your UNCW domain name and password to sign in.)

RAMSeS is only for internal proposal routing and approval. Only UNCW faculty and staff should be listed as CoPIs. Having final approval in RAMSeS does not mean that your proposal has been submitted to the sponsor. It is only one step in a multi-step process.

Federal agency servers routinely experience problems during peak demand times that occur when hundreds of institutions are submitting proposals at the same time. Federal sponsors have little to no tolerance for errors on last-minute proposal submissions. Grants.gov and Fastlane are the two most common electronic submission portals. Neither is perfect and both experience problems regularly. For this reason, we encourage you to plan your submission several days prior to the deadline.

Resources

Below are links to resources to help you with your proposal development.